N. Scott Momaday's "The Shield that Came Back," from the
poetry sequence, "In the Presence of the Sun: A Gathering of
Shields" takes as one of its central metaphors the Plains
Indian warrior shield. Made from the thick chest skin of a
male buffalo, the warrior shield is painted with talismanic--
often animal--symbols, such as birds and deer. It was commonly
believed that the design on the shield, rather than the shield
itself, would protect the warrior. In making the shield a
prominent metaphor in his poem, Momaday places "The Shield
that Came Back" within a long Indian tradition, drawing on
one of its most important cultural markers. But the shield is
also suggestive of Western tradition. The shield has been a
prominent Western image at least as far back as the depiction
of Achilles' shield in the Iliad and has resonated through
much of the literature of the West. In suggesting both Indian
and Western traditions, the shield as central metaphor and
Momaday's poem in general signals its need, and the need of
the Modern American Indian, to negotiate both of these
traditions.

For a poem ostensibly about a shield, however, there is a
disproportionate emphasis on a fan. It is, in fact, one of the
jobs of the poem to work out the identification between the
fan and the shield. The poem opens with Turning Around's
instructions to his son Yellow Grass that, "'You must kill/
thirty scissortails and make me a fan of their feathers.'" The
fan that Yellow Grass is to make--which will require a great
amount of skill and effort both in hunting the scissortails
and weaving together their feathers--will resemble his
father's shield. As Yellow Grass tells Turning Around, of the
blue and black and white and orange beadwork, "'Those are the
colors of your shield." And the "tightly bunched and closely
matched" feathers of the fan "could be spread wide in a disc,
like a shield." In its shape and color, the fan is patterned
after the shield, just as the son is patterned after the
father.

After Turning Around is killed on a raiding expedition to the
Pueblo country, Yellow Grass retrieves his father's shield
"but the fan could not be found." The poem does not reveal
what happened to the fan, whether it was lost, stolen, or
kept close to the father, but much later, when Yellow Grass
was an old man, he told the story of the shield to his
grandson Handsome Horse, with the explanation "'You see, the
shield was more powerful than the fan, for the shield came
back and the fan did not. Some things,/ if they are very
powerful, come back. Remember that. For us, in/ this camp,
that is how to think of the world." The moral to Yellow
Grass's story is that tradition is powerful and will come
back to protect them. It is important for his grandson to
remember that "in this camp" as they struggle through a
marginalized existence encapsulated by Western tradition.

But the poem offers a means of resisting Yellow Grass's
moral. The fan can be seen as not only an excellent imitation
of the shield, but as its successor, an object in its own
right and one that is lauded by the father. Although the
shield returns, it is no longer necessary because Turning
Around is now dead. But the fan, as a successor to the
shield, is lost in the world, just as Yellow Grass as
successor to his father is also lost. The son cannot be
protected by his father's shield, but must recover his own
fan just as his camp cannot be protected by tradition but
must identify with it to make something new. The poem (which
is itself not unlike the fan in its imitation and
transformation of the past) suggests that, rather than
looking back to traditional ways to be saved, one must use
traditional ways to look forward. This is the way that the
modern American Indian can survive in the face of Western
tradition and begin to draw that tradition into its own.